Dir anomaly

Question

Hello to all.
Sorry for my bad english.

I've looked a strange case in FTP's "dir" command.
This one, it can be tested everywhere, independently if either shell or
FTP GUI.

- After FTP login, choose a directory that contain more than 1000 files( I
test it with few more 1000 files with name's length near to 60 chars )
- If you perform a simple "dir", without any filter, the list showed is as
expected.
- If you add it a simple filter, for ex "dir *", the list showed is not
the same to the list produced before.

Anybody can tell me something about this anomaly? Thanks for all.

Answer 1

What type of FTP server are you connecting to?

Different FTP servers often exhibit slightly differing behaviours, particularly when it comes to file listings. The problem may have something to do with the way that the wildcard is being interpreted. Unfortunately, the part of the FTP specification that deals with the arguments to the directory listing commands is not very specific and doesn't explicitly mention wildcards, so some server don't even support them at all. In your case, it seems that the server does support wildcards, but apparently not in the manner you are expecting.

The safest thing is to get a listing of all the files and then filter them yourself.

- Hans (EDT)